Lecture

Flory Approximation

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PHYS-441: Statistical physics of biomacromolecules

Biological macromolecules such as DNA, RNA, proteins and cytoskeletal filaments are polymers. As such, they share a set of properties that are common to any polymer, which are the focus of this course. Details about the protein folding problem will be cove ...

Description

This lecture introduces the Flory approximation, a method used to analyze the behavior of polymer chains. The instructor explains the concept of excluded volume and its impact on the chain's conformation. By examining the probability of different states, the lecture demonstrates how the Flory approximation provides insights into the behavior of polymer chains in various dimensions. The discussion covers the significance of excluded volume in determining the chain's structure and the conditions under which the Flory approximation is valid.

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Related concepts (32)

Polymer

A polymer (ˈpɒlᵻmər; Greek poly-, "many" + -mer, "part") is a substance or material consisting of very large molecules called macromolecules, composed of many repeating subunits. Due to their broad spectrum of properties, both synthetic and natural polymers play essential and ubiquitous roles in everyday life. Polymers range from familiar synthetic plastics such as polystyrene to natural biopolymers such as DNA and proteins that are fundamental to biological structure and function.

Branching (polymer chemistry)

In polymer chemistry, branching is the regular or irregular attachment of side chains to a polymer's backbone chain. It occurs by the replacement of a substituent (e.g. a hydrogen atom) on a monomer subunit by another covalently-bonded chain of that polymer; or, in the case of a graft copolymer, by a chain of another type. Branched polymers have more compact and symmetrical molecular conformations, and exhibit intra-heterogeneous dynamical behavior with respect to the unbranched polymers.

Self-avoiding walk

In mathematics, a self-avoiding walk (SAW) is a sequence of moves on a lattice (a lattice path) that does not visit the same point more than once. This is a special case of the graph theoretical notion of a path. A self-avoiding polygon (SAP) is a closed self-avoiding walk on a lattice. Very little is known rigorously about the self-avoiding walk from a mathematical perspective, although physicists have provided numerous conjectures that are believed to be true and are strongly supported by numerical simulations.

Probability

Probability is the branch of mathematics concerning numerical descriptions of how likely an event is to occur, or how likely it is that a proposition is true. The probability of an event is a number between 0 and 1, where, roughly speaking, 0 indicates impossibility of the event and 1 indicates certainty. The higher the probability of an event, the more likely it is that the event will occur. A simple example is the tossing of a fair (unbiased) coin.

Bayesian probability

Bayesian probability (ˈbeɪziən or ˈbeɪʒən ) is an interpretation of the concept of probability, in which, instead of frequency or propensity of some phenomenon, probability is interpreted as reasonable expectation representing a state of knowledge or as quantification of a personal belief. The Bayesian interpretation of probability can be seen as an extension of propositional logic that enables reasoning with hypotheses; that is, with propositions whose truth or falsity is unknown.

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